Character Counter Pro is also available as a free Chrome extension. It puts the counter next to the page you are working on, keeps your draft when you close the popup, and checks whether the title and meta description of any page you visit will fit the space a search result actually gives them.
Free. No account, no sign-up, no tracking, and no network requests from the extension itself.
What the extension does
The popup opens with the cursor already in the text box, so you can type or paste immediately and watch the counts move. It tracks characters with and without spaces, words, sentences, paragraphs and lines, then adds reading time and speaking time estimates so you can judge a script or a long post before you commit to it.
Eight platform presets sit underneath the counts: X and Twitter, Instagram captions, LinkedIn posts, meta descriptions, SEO titles, SMS, Facebook posts and YouTube titles. Each one shows the remaining space and flips into an over-limit state when you pass the planning target. The presets are guidance for editing, not hard walls, and the tool says so rather than pretending a count is a ruling.
Two small behaviours matter more than they look. The draft survives closing the popup, which is the single most common complaint about counter extensions, and the whole interface can be switched to a dark theme if you work at night. Copy stats puts the numbers into your clipboard, ready for a brief, ticket or approval note.
The page checker, and why pixel width is the honest measure
Click Check this page and the extension reads the title and meta description of the page in the current tab, then shows you three things: the raw text, the character count, and an approximate pixel width. It also renders a Google style preview, cut at the usual display points, so the truncation is visible rather than theoretical.
Character counts alone mislead here. Google truncates snippets by pixel width, so sixty narrow characters can fit where fifty wide ones will not. The extension therefore weights characters individually, counting letters such as m and W more heavily than i or l, and labels the result as an estimate. That is a deliberate choice: a precise looking number that was really a guess would be worse than an approximate number that is honestly labelled. For anything borderline, check the live search result as well.
Pages where this cannot work, such as browser settings screens, PDF viewers and internal Chrome pages, return a plain explanation instead of an error.
Privacy, in plain terms
The extension runs entirely inside your browser. There is no analytics package, no crash reporting, no remote configuration and no server to talk to, and the privacy disclosure on the Chrome Web Store records that no data is collected or used. Text you count never leaves the machine, which matters when the copy is an unreleased campaign, a customer example or an internal launch note.
It asks for three permissions, and each one has a job:
| Permission | Why it is needed |
|---|---|
| storage | Saves your settings and, when you leave draft memory on, keeps the current draft locally so you do not lose work between popup sessions. |
| activeTab | Lets the page checker read the tab you are on, and only after you click the button. |
| scripting | Reads the page title and meta description for that check. It does not alter the page or run anywhere else. |
There are no host permissions, no wildcard access to the sites you visit, and no browsing history reads. If a future version needs anything more, it will be explained here first.
How to install it
- Open the listing on the Chrome Web Store and choose Add to Chrome.
- Confirm the permissions prompt. The three permissions above are all it asks for.
- Pin the icon from the extensions menu in the toolbar so it is one click away.
- Click the icon, paste your draft, and start typing. The counts update as you go.
- Use Check this page when you need to test a title or description already published somewhere.
The extension works in Chrome and in browsers built on the same engine, including Microsoft Edge and Brave, since the listing can be installed from the Chrome Web Store in each of them.
How it fits with the tools on this site
The extension is built for the moment you are writing. The site is built for the moment you are analysing. When a draft needs more than a count, the word counter adds keyword density and speaking time, the case converter reshapes text for code and content systems, and the character limits cheat sheet keeps every major platform limit in one printable page. Everything on the site runs in the browser too, with no upload and no account.
Questions people ask before installing
Is it really free?
Yes. There is no paid tier, no account and no upsell inside the extension. It is published by Chameleon Partnership Limited.
Will it slow Chrome down?
No. The whole extension is small, a few tens of kilobytes, and it does nothing until you click the icon. It has no background process making requests.
Can I use it offline?
Yes. Counting and the page checker both run locally, so the extension keeps working with no connection at all.
Does it work with other browsers?
It installs in Chrome and in Chromium based browsers such as Edge and Brave from the same store listing. It is not a Firefox add-on.